WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump on Wednesday backed away from a bipartisan deal from two US senators to stabilise Obamacare by restoring subsidies to health insurers, one day after signalling his support for the plan.
The agreement reached by Republican Senator Lamar Alexander and Democratic Senator Patty Murray would continue billions of dollars of subsidies to insurers for two years to help lower-income Americans obtain medical coverage. Trump last week announced that he would end the subsidies, potentially creating chaos in the 2018 health insurance markets set up under Obamacare.
“I am supportive of Lamar as a person & also of the process, but I can never support bailing out ins co’s who have made a fortune w/ O’Care,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Trump had indicated support of the agreement during a news conference, saying the White House had been involved in the negotiations and that the agreement would be a “short-term solution” that would “get us over this intermediate hump.”
During Tuesday’s news conference, he also made clear that he wanted broader legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare and that he still considered the subsidies a government handout that had enriched insurance companies.
He also told a conservative think thank, “While I commend the bipartisan work done by Senators Alexander and Murray ... I continue to believe Congress must find a solution to the Obamacare mess instead of providing bailouts to insurance companies.”
Trump’s tweet on Wednesday could undermine efforts by proponents of the deal to build Republican support for it. The Alexander-Murray proposal would meet some Democratic objectives, such as reviving subsidies for Obamacare and restoring $106 million in funding for a federal programme that helps people enrol in insurance plans.
In exchange, Republicans would get more flexibility for states to offer a wider variety of health insurance plans while maintaining the requirement that sick and healthy people be charged the same rates for coverage. The subsidies compensate private insurers for reducing deductibles, co-payments and other out-of-pocket expenses for low-income customers. — Reuters
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